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Not many business executives can measure success in the number of lives they've helped save. John Meiners can.

As the executive vice president of Emergency Cardiovascular Care and Global Strategies at the American Heart Association (AHA), his decisions can be matters of life and death. Yet when he started in the role five years ago, Meiners and his associates risked implementing bold changes.

The stakes were high. About one in every three deaths in the U.S. is the result of cardiovascular disease; worldwide, 17.3 million people die of it every year. By 2030, the AHA expects that number to grow to 23.6 million. The AHA has more than 3,000 employees and 30 million volunteers and supporters working to spread lifesaving knowledge. Yet a person suffering a cardiac emergency gets desperately needed CPR from a bystander only 32 percent of the time.

Why?

“Fear, more than anything else," says Meiners. “People are afraid they'll do it wrong."

Choosing Change

Refusing to be similarly stymied by fear, Meiners and the volunteer leadership of the organization set about recalibrating the AHA's approach to educating and training people in emergency resuscitation. For an organization that's been a national authority since 1924, it was hard to determine how to approach change. For guidance, the AHA enlisted the help of executive performance consultant firm Gap International.

The consultant firm helped the AHA see how crucial it was for its leaders to discover new possibilities for growth. In a white paper on creating and growing an organization prepared for the 21st century, Gap International CEO Pontish Yeramyan writes, “It is important for organizations to find ways to stretch into uncharted territories for growth and bring a willingness to take on even the most hopeless challenges."

Yeramyan adds that, “At any moment an organization is either growing or declining—there is no middle ground." This did not bode well for the AHA, which was using the techniques of the '90s to disseminate CPR training, relying on paper textbooks and lengthy, in-person classes.

The Way Forward

Meiners made several advancements to ensure that the AHA not only adjusts to the modern age, but helps guide it. He added online classes and simulation training to the CPR training arsenal. The AHA has stepped up its Hands Only campaign, aimed at demystifying CPR and creating a greater understanding of its importance. Realizing that change begins with young people, Meiners helped form an initiative to make CPR a high school graduation requirement. To date, 21 U.S. states have mandated the training, allowing more than 1 million students to learn lifesaving CPR skills every year.

“Gap International taught me the importance of taking a stand," Meiners says. “Our stand is that everyone should learn CPR and learn to save a life. We are creating a generation of lifesavers."

Innovation Leads To A Win-Win Solution

Gap International encouraged AHA's leaders to promote growth by focusing on innovation. In the white paper, Yeramyan explains that companies can clear the way toward a thriving organization by “developing an expanded platform for relentless innovation," and by empowering managers to “liberate everyone in the organization to become innovators."

Through conversations with the association's medical and science volunteers, Meiners realized that the AHA needed to rethink its CPR training program. Internal studies revealed that health-care workers' skills were fading soon after course completion. To solve the problem, the AHA developed an alliance with Norwegian company Laerdal Medical to launch the Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI) Program. The program replaces offsite courses with shorter, more frequent worksite sessions. By integrating the training with the work of the hospital, RQI connects teaching to real-world results.

Texas Health Resources-Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas adopted the RQI program in 2014, and Dr. Cole Edmonson is a fan. “RQI transformed our CPR training in every way," he says. There was a significant increase in survival rates, and an uptick in the confidence level and performance of employees trained in the RQI program.

Expanding Beyond Borders

Perhaps the most extraordinary area of growth for the AHA in the past five years has been its global expansion. The AHA now has 650 CPR centers around the world, training 16 million people annually. According to AHA CEO Nancy Brown “Our global strategies mirror our domestic values, rooted in the pursuit to ensure equitable health for all."

The AHA has a worldwide impact, and Meiners is inspired by the organization's trajectory. Revenue has grown rapidly over the past five years, reaching $758 million. The Emergency Cardiovascular Care program has more than doubled in size in the same period, with an anticipated growth of 30 percent for 2016. “Gap International shared wisdom—like nuggets of gold—as to what our future possibility is," he says.

Having exceeded many of its goals in the last 10 years, the AHA is now working toward new goals for 2020: improving the cardiovascular health of Americans by 20 percent and reducing deaths from cardiovascular disease and stroke by 20 percent.

Meiners and American Heart Association volunteers remain committed to finding new ways to realize the greater vision that guides their work.

What impact do you want to have on those around you? This is an important question because we are influencing people all the time.

We tend to be more aware of the way others affect us, but it must go both ways. Everyone has likely had the experience of someone “rubbing off” on them. When you’re around a passionate person, your passion comes out. If those around you are upset, it might make you upset too. How tuned in are you to the way you show up and the experience you leave other people with?

Over the years, some interesting experiments have been done demonstrating just how influential we all are:

In 1964, Robert Rosenthal demonstrated that, when teachers expected kids to be smart, they actually got smarter.

In 1998, Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller praised some kids for being smart and others for working hard. Those praised for intelligence avoided future challenging assignments and their performance declined. Those praised for working hard preferred seeing harder problems and their performance ultimately improved.

In 2014, Facebook conducted an experiment with more than half a million people in which they adjusted the frequency of negative and positive posts. Facebook showed that emotional states can be transferred to others without their awareness.

We can’t turn off our influence, but we can control it. There are places where we do this naturally because we want to have a positive influence: with our families, close friends, or people that work for us. But what about everywhere else? We encounter so many people each day, not to mention those we reach via email, phone, text, and Facebook. It stands to reason that the more we are at our personal best, doing our best work, the more we will motivate and inspire those around us. The question then becomes, what is our best?

EVERYONE HAS GENIUS

So often we chalk up our wins to hard work, creativity, or perseverance—but we don’t ask ourselves what underpins these character traits and how we can pass them along to others. If it were as easy as telling someone to “work harder,” then there would be a lot more hard workers in the world.

Why is it that some people work harder than others, or appear more creative? Gap International finds the answer in what it calls Genius: the way our mind is working during our greatest successes. Genius is not something you are, it is something you have. Since everyone has accomplishments and things that they are proud of, everyone also has Genius.

Genius is most apparent in moments of accomplishment. By articulating the specific language of our best thinking—translating it from fuzzy thoughts to clear, precise words—it becomes tangible and repeatable. You can’t just tell someone to “be more creative,” but if you share with them how you think about creativity, they will see opportunities and actions to take that they couldn’t see before. The more we study and practice our Genius, the more it will show up in ourselves and in others, creating an environment where everyone can be their best.

GENIUS BEGETS GENIUS

Focusing on the environment is exactly what people do when they want to be their best. They create an environment where their Genius rubs off on others, and others’ Genius rubs off on them. In this way Genius begets Genius, and leads to people being better than they ever could be on their own. What follows is the creation of extraordinary things across business, science and the arts.

In Powers of Two, Joshua Wolf Shenk argues that relationships are essential to creativity: there is a Wozniak for every Jobs, a Lennon for every McCartney. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner tells the story of Bell Labs, the research and development arm of AT&T that gave us the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, the cell phone, and countless other groundbreaking technologies. They built their Murray Hill headquarters with a 700-foot-long hallway to encourage chance encounters of people, problems and ideas. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many artists including Monet, Picasso and Van Gogh lived and worked in Montmartre. As a result of their proximity and sharing of ideas, several artists’ associations were formed and some of their best work was created. Even today, Hollywood could be considered a modern-day Montmartre for those looking to advance their film careers. It’s a place to rub elbows with others in the industry so that the best ideas can take root and flourish.

Those geniuses are known for collaborating, but even one of the most iconic lone geniuses credits part of his success to someone else. While Albert Einstein’s June 1905 paper on special relativity cites no other scientific papers or researchers, it ends with an acknowledgement of engineer Michele Besso, who Einstein called the best sounding board in the whole of Europe:

“In conclusion I wish to say that in working at the problem here dealt with I have had the loyal assistance of my friend and colleague M. Besso, and that I am indebted to him for several valuable suggestions.”

– On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, June 30 1905

So, what does this tell us? If we want to build the next Apple Computer or write the next Abbey Road, it’s pretty clear we won’t do it alone, and building an environment of Genius will be essential. But actually, it’s essential anyway if we want to do our own best work. However successful you are, others can make you better. And, you can make them better too. Discovering and sharing your Genius is one way to bring out the best in yourself and everyone around you.

A decade ago, Ohlthaver & List was simply a Namibian holding company with a wide range of disparate businesses ranging from retail to IT to farming to a brewery. Today, it's the three-time winner of Deloitte's "Best Company to Work For" in its region. It has also reduced its carbon footprint and exceeded its wildest profit goals — in the case of the brewery, by seven times its stated goal. And while O&L still owns a similar collection of businesses, "disparate" is the last way this now-coordinated, focused group of companies could be described.

What happened?

It all began with a new executive, and the desire to be better.

"The companies were basically running their own show," says Sven Thieme, executive chairman of O&L. "They had their own systems, own cultures, everything. It was a very unfocused business. When I took over, the goal was to create one culture and get everything in line."

Exactly how to achieve this across such different companies seemed a near-impossible task. But as Gap International Vice President Betsy Johnson explains, when a company wants to make big things happen, but doesn't know how, a brand new corporate strategy is needed -- one that will unify the enterprise with extraordinary vision and goals to match it. O&L worked with business performance consulting firm Gap International to take a hard look at its company and corporate structure, and create a new roadmap for success.

Leading by example

After taking Gap International's team-based Performance Diagnostic survey, a unique tool for measuring a company’s leaders and culture, O&L leaders knew exactly where to begin to make changes: with themselves.

"I think we never understood what leadership was all about," explains Thieme.

To remedy this, O&L introduced a leadership model that emphasized humility, connectedness, focus on employees, and openness to new ideas. The model included the leaders of the holding company, as well as the leaders of each business it owned. From company to company, the leadership culture began to align, creating a “Breakthrough Performance Environment.” In practice, this meant O&L's companies gradually began to operate with the same mindset, all directed from the top, and ultimately owned by the various layers of leadership as they become more aligned over time.

"Basically, everything starts and ends with me," Thieme says. "It's completely leading by example. I'm staying humble; I want them to see me as a normal, approachable person."

Focusing on its people

That, in turn, has encouraged leadership throughout the O&L companies to be humble and approachable too, something employees tend to like. But this was only the first step toward reshaping the business in ways that connected with workers. In fact, making them happy is a key part of O&L's new strategy.

"If we look after our people, they will look after our customers," says Thieme. "That has made us very focused on people as an organization."

For example, previously, to evaluate performance, O&L might have asked their retail operation employees, "What is the customer feedback?"

Now, they start with the employees, Thieme says, by asking, "Has everybody got the tools they need?"

If employees don't have the tools they need to do their jobs well, or if their work environment is challenging, it can negatively impact their performance. When those needs are addressed, employees are more satisfied and more effective—and this translates into results for the business.

In one instance, the retail operation decreased profit loss due to perishable goods going bad before they could be sold. According to Thieme, this success was a direct result of workers who cared more about their work and had the resources they needed to do it well.

Encouraging Alignment

In addition to creating happy workers, O&L sought to improve the connection and alignment between employees and leaders. Through relationship-building exercises and open lines of communication, employees now feel freer to share new ideas and alert leaders to problems.

"That has to do with the speed of execution," says Gap's Johnson. "The more connected people are, the faster things get done."

Alignment means connecting employees to the purpose of the entire company, not just their jobs. Employers are motivated to contribute to the success of O&L and free to communicate ideas to achieve that success.

This paid off in a big way. When O&L needed a $20 million software-upgrade, its IT staff came forward with an idea. Rather than outsource the project to consultants, the IT department could do the job internally for $800,000. It knew the system, and was uniquely qualified to identify this opportunity to save the company from a huge expense.

"That's the depth and the quality of connection that exists between the leaders and the teammates and the teammates and each other," says Johnson. "A true quality of people knowing each other is that they begin to be able to talk about things."

Setting big goals

O&L's core purpose in developing a new corporate strategy was to achieve big things. Now, setting seemingly impossible goals — increasing their profits seven-fold, or becoming the best place to work in its region year after year — is something the company does at regular intervals. And because everyone in O&L's businesses is aligned and willing to follow the leadership's example to achieve those goals, they simply get done.

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